LEARN FROM INCREDIBLE STUDENTS! This session, co-led with student presenters, will support educators in teaching difficult histories of mass violence and/or genocide in ways that are accessible for their students. Participants will explore this new concept and students' understandings of it to consider how their own values, contexts, students, and assumptions shape their own ideas. Then, by analyzing and reflecting on student-generated data, participants will consider the connections and tensions between their conceptions and students’. Finally, they will work together to identify and modify part of a lesson to make it more age-accessible. This session aims to empower teachers in their capacity to facilitate the learning of complex and emotionally-provocative histories more broadly by centering the voices of students in their decisions-making.
In this session, you will:
Reflect, discuss, and identify what age-accessible learning looks like in your classroom.
Compare and contrast your notions of age-accessibility to students’.
Indentify or draft learning opportunities about/through difficult histories that are age-accessible for your students.
If the American Revolution defines our national identity, why does our teaching about it feel concentrated in a handful of places on the East Coast? This session examines that tension by arguing that local history is not an add on to Revolutionary era instruction but a way to deepen it. Using a variety of free resources, we will demonstrate how different perspectives, including regional, local, and Indigenous, can reshape the national narrative around the Revolutionary era.
In this session, you will:
Interact with primary sources that demonstrate the impact of the Revolutionary Era in Wisconsin.
Come away with free media resources that demonstrate inquiry into historical eras.
Discuss ways you can make the Revolutionary Era relevant and engaging to your students.
